After a burst of massive street protests and a period of dormant self-reflection, the Occupy movement has settled into its second year as a force for community-rooted resistance.
Two weeks ago I was in my hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey, wading waist deep in a murky combination of floodwater, oil and sewage. More than a week later, after finally getting unstuck from New Jersey (even the deepest Jersey pride has its limits…), I found myself in a van full of Occupy Sandy activists… More
On Tuesday morning, as New Yorkers were beginning to vote, 60 polling stations had been either destroyed or turned into emergency shelters. Above the same waters that had flooded many of the city’s coastal neighborhoods a week before, I and other Occupy movement activists hung a banner at the midpoint of the Manhattan Bridge. With… More
I’m not sure when I realized that we were in the middle of a full-blown disaster. Maybe it was when I saw the outline of a National Guard soldier hanging off the side of a hummer on a blackened strip of Rockaway Boulevard. Perhaps it was when I received a panicky email from an assemblyman’s… More
Sung in unison by 50 voices and accompanied by the melancholic twang of a banjo, these lines echoed throughout the otherwise vacant Deutsche Bank atrium at 60 Wall Street last Sunday: Every day, several times a day, a thought comes over me. I owe more debt than I can pay back, more money than I’ll… More
I fought four combat tours in the U.S. Army; I thought when I went AWOL from Fort Bragg that the war was over for me. But I found myself in the heart of a new battle — a war of words and a war of peace-fighters who put their lives on the line for their… More
On the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, members of America’s wealthiest 1 percent were rounded up in New York’s Financial District and led away in handcuffs. The NYPD, whose hands were full chucking demonstrators into the back of paddy wagons yesterday — about a hundred total — seeded jurisdiction over the suits to… More
On Monday’s episode of Democracy Now! two of us from Waging Nonviolence appeared to discuss the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. First, WNV editor Nathan Schneider spoke with Frances Fox Piven, the renowned political scientist, and Suzanne Collado, an organizer with OWS’ Strike Debt campaign: Following that, our correspondent Laura Gottesdiener discussed her reporting on the rent strike… More
Anniversaries, like today’s one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, bring about pangs of nostalgia as we remember what was and what we could have been. After participating in numerous Occupy protests (while continuing my graduate studies in sociology) this past year, reading the Situationists’ accounts of the 1968 occupations movement makes this OWS anniversary even… More
“The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” cried voices across Zuccotti Park on Wednesday night as 30 people sat with their arms interlocked, surrounded by cameras and sympathetic onlookers. NYPD officers were positioned some distance away at the concrete barricades that had begun surrounding the park. Confronting the sit-in with mock dispersal… More